Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#1

Post by mirceasoaica » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 6:48 AM UTC

I've been a web developer for the past 10 years and I've mostly used PHP in my projects. I've also had a chance to code in JavaScript, C#, Delphi. I've had the chance to build large website (>500k users/day) and desktop apps used by millions of users per month, but I always used the technologies that felt comfortable to me. I knew Zend Framework very well, so I used that one to build the services.

My "oh wow" moment was when I discovered Phalcon PHP framework (https://phalconphp.com/en/) about a year ago. I've switched all our projects on this framework and saved thousands of $$ because of the performance impact.

The other thing that made my day was when I discovered Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/). I never knew Python, but I decided to give it a try. The performance is amazing (I always thought that it was slower than PHP - I was wrong) and it seems I can build the projects faster that I ever could using PHP (with any framework).

What were your "wow" moments in your career? What was your best decision to improve your work?

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#2

Post by Vanit » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

I don't know if it was career changing, but NodeJS blew my mind when at the time our company was using a lot of PHP cron jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#3

Post by cel1ne » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:48 AM UTC

Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/

Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#4

Post by mirceasoaica » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:48 AM UTC

Vanit wrote: post #2

I don't know if it was career changing, but NodeJS blew my mind when at the time our company was using a lot of PHP cron jobs.

Same thing happened to us. We moved a lot of cron logic to nodejs and we were able to increase speed and reduce hardware costs.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#5

Post by mirceasoaica » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

cel1ne wrote: post #3

Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/ Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.

I bookmarked it. Are you using bootstrap / foundation?

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#6

Post by sconxu » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:51 AM UTC

For me it was when I discovered React-Native. As a one man show in the beginning of our mobile application existence, developing both for Android and IOS at the same time was a blessing.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#7

Post by cbmueller » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:55 AM UTC

For me: https://d3js.org/ Once i learned how to use d3 i was like: This is what i want to do.

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#8

Post by cutler » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:55 AM UTC

Django faster than raw PHP or Phalcon. I find that hard to believe. Are we talking PHP7?

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#9

Post by txprog » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:56 AM UTC

Kivy (https://kivy.org) changed my career too. I make now a living mostly due to this project :)

Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?

#10

Post by cel1ne » Tue, Oct 25, 2016, 7:56 AM UTC

mirceasoaica wrote: post #5

cel1ne wrote: post #3

Tachyons.css: http://tachyons.io/ Suddenly CSS became fun again and my time designing websites went down by a guessed factor of 5.

I bookmarked it. Are you using bootstrap / foundation?

I've used bootstrap in the past, but not anymore.

Tachyons is different, it doesn't give you components but single-purpose classes and a font-relative layouting system:

http://tachyons.io/docs/layout/spacing/

It takes a while getting used to the names, but after that it's just awesome that you don't have to think about padding, margin and font-size values anymore. Just slap "pa1" or "pa2" there and everything looks pretty.